It strikes me as very sad that this book evidently didn't mean as much to the recipient as it did to the giver. I have a copy of Neruda's Twenty Love Poems with a similar inscription, also found in a used book store. I guess, in love, sometimes it hurts instead (thanks, Adele), but that doesn't stop it being sad to find these remnants of strangers' lost loves.

The problem of evil is difficult, but I think it is more difficult emotionally than intellectually.

Using Epicurus's form of the problem that's been posted here in the comments already, the false step in that argument comes in the line, "Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent." That he is malevolent is not the only possible reason why he would choose not to make evil impossible. He may feel, as I believe is the case, that evil is evil, but unavoidable as a byproduct in a much higher good.

What I mean by this is that free will is the root 'cause' of evil: our ability to choose our actions necessarily implies the ability to choose to do evil things. But free will is itself a good thing, and the only thing that makes it possible for us to be really ourselves, our own beings instead of puppets programmed by God.

People will say: "God should have made us so that we just wouldn't want bad things." I think that that is a misunderstanding of what evil is. Evil is not wanting bad things; evil is trying to get good things in bad ways. Sexual pleasure is a good thing; raping someone is a bad way to get it. Specifically, rape (and other evils) is the individual pursuing his pleasure without caring whether that causes others pain. It is selfishness: "I'm getting mine, and fuck you if you get in my way."

I don't think it is possible for there to be a world in which individual free will and desirable things do not lead to temptations to pursue one's desires selfishly. But those conditions - free will and good things - are also necessary conditions for a good world populated by creatures capable of self-realization and love.

You are pretty much always going to want to use a fence or guide of some kind when using your router, except when you're using a bit with a pilot bearing that's meant to ride along the outside edge of your workpiece (for roundovers and other edge-shaping work), and if you ever decide to get into freehand cutting of letters and designs and such. But cutting a perfectly straight line with a router requires a fence or guide.

The reason it requires a guide is that routers are actually cutting the wood at right angles to your direction of travel, no matter which way you're moving the router. And you'll need to do a bit of imagining to keep straight which way the router is going to push: standing at the bench, moving the router from right to left, it will push toward your body; but moving the router from left to right will make it pull away from your body. So you'll need to get the hang of visualizing which way it's going to pull (hint: with your right hand palm down, point your index finger the direction you're going to move the router. Now stick out your thumb - that's the way it's going to pull, and that's the side you need to put your fence on).

All emails are legible - 'legible' means 'I can make out what the words are supposed to be'. But, yes, everyone should know how to write something coherent, cogent, lucid, clear, relevant, and to the point.

Full disclosure: I don't like Hegel because I think his writing is so bad that it is, in many places, not possible to ascertain what he really meant. And I also think that many of the people who argue about what Hegel meant are subscribers to the academic theory of difficulty: that complicated language is the measure of complicated thought. See, for instance, this quote from Judith Butler:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

I take the Creation account in Genesis as a myth - in the sense of, 'never actually happened, but full of profound meaning about what actually happened' - which is, historically and currently, a mainstream Christian position. So I happily accept the current understanding of science on the evolution of life on this planet, except that science has no comment on God's role in the affair, while I think He set it in motion and helped it along.

So somewhere along the line, a particular species of ape became intelligent enough to understand moral questions: I am me, you are you, I want this and you want it too, and we have a choice about how to treat this conflict of interests. This was the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; before this point, no terrestrial creature was capable of understanding the abstract idea of good and evil.

And, through all the tens of thousands of years and generations down to us, each member of our species has been born into the world ignorant of everything, and has had to learn for themselves all the lessons of life. It is entirely natural that, being born me, it is a difficult and slow process to learn to be fully fair, kind, just, and merciful to you. That's my understanding of 'original sin' - not that we got handed down a flawed nature, but that the simple fact of being an I distinct from all the You's contains the inherent preference for self over others that is the basis of all sin/immoral behavior.

So, my answer to your question: heaven is post-sin. The people who will live there will all be mature individuals who have lived through a life on Earth, who grew up in a world made rotten by selfishness, greed, and indifference, and who learned that deep happiness and fulfillment is only possible by being loving, considerate, just, and selfless. To ask why people like that don't fall back into sin is like asking why adults don't revert to throwing tantrums like toddlers when they can't have what they want: because that doesn't work.

Which raises a possible answer why Hegel's Simple English page is so sparse compared to so many other philosophers': who can render Hegel's ideas into simple terms without massive controversy from other people who think Hegel meant something quite different?

Hey, sorry if I came across dick-ish myself. Didn't mean to - and, seeing as you fixed the 's', which was undoubtedly a mere typo in the first place, I switched you to an upvote.

As for your question, sure I have ideas, and I can describe my ideas for you if you're sincerely interested, but I don't claim to have any strong proof that they're certainly right. I merely take the general idea that God created the world and pronounced it 'good', and that once we fix all the shit that we've caused in ourselves and in the world, we can all get started living the good life, which will, at heart, be all the stuff we like doing here minus assholes (and minus our own asshole-ish tendences), and plus levels of friendliness, charity, kindness and consideration that would put Gandhi and Mother Teresa to shame. I imagine there will be fewer cars, and more trees. And probably you'll have to work pretty hard to cause yourself a hangover.

Thanks for the considerate reply. It's so much nicer arguing with people who don't assume that people who disagree with them must be malicious :) And yeah, I know, my replies usually come out longer than I planned too.

I don't think it is wholly valid to count realities which are derived from ours as additional data points showing that most realities must be like ours. Simulated realities based on our own naturally resemble it, and share many characteristics with it, just as a species descended from another one naturally shares a great deal of traits with its ancestor. The analogy to evolution breaks down when we try to go back the other way, though: that our reality is the way it is, is no proof that the reality (if there is one) above ours must be very similar. As you said, we can make some pretty wonky simulations that may not have much in common with our reality - we just generally don't, either out of a lack of imagination or because it's simply easier and more useful for our purposes to make it with familiar features.

I don't have any problem with supposing that there might be some or many levels of reality above ours. We may be very far down a long chain of 'simulated' realities (I don't know what other word to use, but 'simulated' gives a connotation of fakeness that I don't like: our reality may be based on other, more fundamental ones, but that doesn't make this thing that we're existing in any less real. This is real; I am; my experience is an actual experience.)

My main quibble is with supposing that God "resides in" the (ultimate) supernature, in the sense of it being an environment that is external to Him and has laws analogous to our physical ones that make His existence possible. I disagree with the statement, "God operates within the framework of his supernature." Wherever the ultimate source of all reality is, however far removed from ours, I think it simply is God - not that He is in it.

I think this because I am a philosophical idealist, as opposed to a physical materialist: I think that the fundamental reality is consciousness, not matter. And I believe that because (among other reasons), it seems to me to make for the most parsimonious account of reality. As I see it, there is an unavoidable, and utterly unanswerable, mystery at the root of any account of existence: the question of how it is that anything exists at all. If God exists, I do not see how even He could explain how it is that he exists. So we're stuck with an unfathomable mystery whether we believe in a Creator or whether we believe that everything has come from non-sentient physical forces and particles. But physicalism then has to face another unfathomable mystery: how to account for consciousness. And I don't at all see that it can - neither, incidentally, can Thomas Nagel, who has recently published a book trying to deal with physicalism's apparent inability to explain consciousness. I don't believe matter can account for consciousness - but consciousness can account for the (apparent) reality of matter. So Idealism, as I see it, reduces the number of unsolvable mysteries by half, as well as being in line with the overwhelming prevalence of human belief in non-physical realities, and with the specifically religious contents of history.

So, yeah: longer than planned. Incidentally, I looked through your comment history and saw some comments on God and time - did you see the thread on a timelessness argument against God's existence? I have a conversation going there with OP that you might like to weigh in on.

I wouldn't call it a logical contradiction. I would call it a contradiction between two mutable human concepts, at worst, or a limitation on our understanding of those concepts, at best. Like I said before, I think that we, all of us, are largely out of our depth when trying to accurately conceive of these things as they actually are. Have you heard the joke about the spherical cow?

But here are my responses. First, I'm not troubled by God not being conceived of as absolutely unconditioned by anything not Himself. I don't think that God Himself can explain how it is that He exists; "I Am" is, I expect, the very bottom of the causal chain, whether we picture God saying it, or it being what the flux of quantum particles and forces would have said just prior to the Big Bang, if they were the sort of things that could talk. At some point, either something just was, or we have to accept an incomprehensible infinite regress. Both are totally inexplicable; I lean toward the comprehensible inexplicability.

Second, I'm not sure why we can't conceive of time as an internal attribute of God's, a necessary and intrinsic consequence of His consciousness. I'm sitting here on my couch, late at night, and everything is quiet and still: at any given instant, I am simultaneously aware of many things: the ache in my legs, the temperature of the air on my skin, the quality of the light, that barely discernible ringing in your ears that sometimes shows up in silence. There is no time involved in perceiving these things collectively - I don't have to think about the ache now and then the light and then the warmth on my skin: they are all present to my mind simultaneously. If I were an infinite being, I can imagine that infinitely more things might be simultaneously, timelessly present to my mind, and that one of these things might be every possible sequence of events involving certain quantities and configurations of matter and lesser minds. That even though no change were happening to or within me, I was instantly perceiving infinite series of causes and effects that certain limited creatures would experience sequentially as 'change' and think of as the abstraction 'time'.

Her world (as described, anyway) is pretty nice. I wouldn't mind (I think) something like it, although her prime directive has a couple odd limitations that I would like to see ironed out - such as the 'pony' clause: why force everyone to become ponies, whether they wanted to be humans, or hobbits, or Transformers, etc.? Human values could be optimized inside the structure of any mundane or fantastic canon. And second, the definition of 'human' is obviously a limitation in the story: CelestAI evidently wipes out any number of galactic intelligences that failed to meet the criteria for 'human' that were given to her.